SHOCK TREATMENT part 3

Thursday night before Friday’s morning treatment. I wrote half of a song this night. Oddly and alternately elated and tired. Tiredness is a kind of madness so Dostoevsky says and am I to argue? The man with whom I share a room at night is watching sport television and hiccupping. He must be killed.

2004, morning after the second treatment. I did not sleep last night, though that in itself is not particularly surprising in consideration of the solid sleep I ascertained the night before and not unlike me or even possibly unlike others if the stress were shared out. The details of the lead up to the general anesthetic are very clear to me, as are the details of the one previous. Perhaps I will be further affected after more treatments, I really don’t know. I feel fried. It is a sensation that I think may well be outside my previous experience. It is not completely unpleasant, though mostly so. Certainly it is preferable to many of the states and sensations that the illness (the fucking curse) of bipolar subjects me to with pendulous swinging clubbing force. I have a headache I suppose and my usual restless wandering prickling and speeding thoughts, made worse by the headache and the lack of my music to listen to. I HATE going without a sound track. I suppose I should begin counting down the days. I know I will be having six treatments, one every two days. So it should take twelve days as the lunatic flies, but may not as the specialists involved seem unlikely to work weekends. This would be the third day. Fu-uck. And I hate this place so well already. That would leave me here for another 9 days. My teeth hurt from being clenched so hard so desperately life-bleedingly hard in seizure. I can not of course remember it but it is akin to waking from a drinking binge to find that I had been in a fight. I feel a similar kind of shame.

21/2/2004 I managed to leave my keyboard and mouse at home and could not get them till this evening – this being an ancient piece of crap laptop I have only begun to write and it is 7.35 in the evening. No memory loss that I can (can I? would I even know? How can anyone ask themselves questions like this?) perceive. I seem to be able to see through my mind like a piece of plate glass being made on boiling tin. I feel… I feel a deep, a bone deep despair. I am constantly hyper-conscious of my actions; of my words. I cannot imagine being otherwise. It is unpleasant and the way I have felt in my lifetime’s gathered sense. Arc them and reel them in under a long deep grass scythe and that is with fucking brutal clarity the answer that I get. I suspect that I feel things in some star-bright way… no wait, ill chosen metaphor.

I suspect that I feel things raw; as if the skin had been taken from my eyes, my hands, my ears, mouth and throat. Each sense, I believe, is tuned in some way to over-provide me with stimuli and I have too much. Too much! My hands are fucking full it runs out between my fingers too fucking much.

I have felt this day little different than I have felt on any other day. I feel tired, I want to go to sleep, I want it all to stop hurting me just for a little while. Am I working myself up to this? Is this what I do? OK few alternatives no recourse to escape never ever, I think I will go and get some more meds and have a cigarette.

Find me something else, ever.

I dare you.

Hm well I have done those two things and I think I do feel slightly better, strange (so close that word, to strangle!) as it is for me to admit. I also had tea. A nice hot cup of tea, some godamned biscuits and some psychiatric medication and we have A NEW PAUL.

I’m a Psychiatric Nurse, and have seen some amazing results for people who have had ECT.It is not the rather brutal thing of the past, you are given a light General Anaesthetic to relax muscle,Memory loss can be a troublesome short-term side effect …but for many this is nothing against the relief of severe depression, or traumatic psychosis.Of course it does not work for everyone, and not suitable for everyone … and maybe other medications might work better…

Hope you feel some benefit soon..

pijinlane
almost 10 years ago

Still not sure what effect zapping an electric current through someone’s brain produces … re-alignment of the neural pathways or re-starting some that were blocked or unblocking them all?? It’s bizarre! and who thought it up in the first place? … Has it worked? All power to you Paul